'Winter in Provincetown' exhibit

Last summer, the Harbor Hotel Provincetown began hosting "ArtBeat," a bimonthly art exhibition aimed at "celebrating the Provincetown art experience."The hotel is open year-round, so "ArtBeat" has been extended to the off-season with "Winter in Provincetown," which features loans from Provincetown Art Association and Museum's permanent collection and the Berta Walker Gallery.

Last summer, the Harbor Hotel Provincetown began hosting "ArtBeat," a bimonthly art exhibition aimed at "celebrating the Provincetown art experience."The hotel is open year-round, so "ArtBeat" has been extended to the off-season with "Winter in Provincetown," which features loans from Provincetown Art Association and Museum's permanent collection and the Berta Walker Gallery.

Paul Resika paintings were pulled at the last minute due to their fragile nature, so artist Nancy Whorf is left to carry the show. Her works are quite fine, but without Resika, the show feels like winter: a little empty, a little bereft.

As space to view art, the hotel's foyer and dining room is not particularly forgiving. It has limited wall space and is full of visual obstructions, so that in some cases, you need to go looking for the art: a painting above the nook of a server station, for example. The PAAM loans are somewhat innocuous genre paintings of minor painters like Charles Darby, Marston Hodgin and Dorothy E. Cook — snowy scenes with barren trees and buildings; icy docks of winter.

They are pleasant but not distinguished enough to stand up next to the assertive energy of Nancy Whorf's paintings. Everything about a Whorf is supercharged: the color, quite often the scale, the emotion, the movement. Most of all, it's the paint — heavy tracts of it lathered on with palette knives so that the surfaces are sculpted with a kind of direct-from-the-tube vigor, a dense impasto of vibrant color that activates her paintings.

Her Provincetown streetscapes turn the single vanishing point of Commercial Street into emotive narratives. In "Provincetown at Night," the artificial lighting casts hard shadows and strange colors onto the road — mint green, lavender, butterscotch and aubergine — as a few sparse figures stroll down the magic of its snowy corridor. "Closed for the Season" is a desolate night scene of the street covered with snow as a lone figure walks a dog in the distance, their progress marked by a recession of fresh footprints that pulls you into the painting's quiet enveloping cosmos.

The exhibit's centerpiece is Whorf's 8-foot-long panorama "Welcome to Provincetown, Winter," a stormy scene painted in a turbulent palette of earthy verde and yellow ochre, cool blue, grey and a thick icing of stark white. The piece hangs in the dining room above a buffet table, but it's precisely the painting's location that, in part, makes it so special. Face the painting and step to the left so you look out the large hotel windows, and you see what Whorf saw and painted: the bay on the left, Commercial Street to the right, leading into town, all the way down to the familiar frame of the house that she uses to center her painting. Step into the street and you're in the painting itself, a neat kind of illusion that makes the scene all the more real and unreal as you try to place yourself between the two worlds.